The Nazis dont get quoted much, except for Hermann Goering, who said, Whenever I hear the word culture I reach for my revolver. When Goering said that, he meant that he would like to shoot all intellectuals (Jews) because theyd read more books than he had. You cant shoot a word, like culture, but you can certainly shoot the people you might think cultural or cultured.

Goering was an out-and-out murderer, but the career of the word culture gives me pause. The word has very much detached itself from any living entities that might contain it and has made a career of its own, like a balloon that wont stop inflating.

Everything is now said to have a culture. We have Nazi culture, we have corporate culture and every city has its own culture (Cleveland, Detroit, Newark, New Orleans). Insert the culture of in front of any noun, and you wont get much dissent. I have a friend who was hired to change the corporate culture at a large company, and she quit after a month because she couldnt get her teeth into the word culture. She knew that what needed to be done was to fire a bunch of people and put in a new code of ethics  but culture? Well, that was like dandelion seeds. To change it you have to leave the earth.

The purpose of the word culture these days is to express something large and unwieldy that has nonetheless some common features. Its shorthand for atmosphere, only instead of vapor and clouds, its made of thoughts, ideas, people and operating procedures. For historians and archeologists, culture has come in handy to describe humans in the past, but inflation reigns even there. Saying Neolithic culture is an easy way to skip a few hundred thousand years, while saying Vichy culture is to turn the word into an adjective, a vaguely signifying qualifier.

The word culture has either a positive or negative sense, depending on what you already think about the thing it qualifies. The culture of New Orleans generally means good things: music, food, easygoing people, street festivals. It is invoked to bring business and tourists to the city. There is no doubt a real culture at the origin of this bloated gumbo, but that culture is not so easily described. For one thing, culture is poverty: the expression of people who cant afford the readymade. Most Americans appreciate such a thing only if it comes packaged as a readymade. Live culture, in New Orleans or anywhere else, is difficult to package because it is an evolving artistic activity whose purpose is to undo such generalities as the culture of . In other words, most of what marketers, journalists and academics call culture, is not.

Ezra Pound called the real thing kulchur, to describe an activity, instead of a qualifier. Unfortunately, that k brings it closer to Goering than to yogurt, so it isnt of much use now. In 20th century Europe a cultured person was a professional, not an artist. The culture of this cultured type consisted in keeping up with intellectual fashion, and the culture he was marinated in ranged from the classics to the latest kitsch. No self-respecting artist until the late (very late!) 20th century referred to anything as culture, as in the culture of Bali. We dont have much of that that type of person in America, but we have plenty of P.R. men who find the word marketable.

The only thing worse than culture is when its joined with creative. Thats when I reach for both of my red pens.